by Jonah Stein on December 14, 2009
From the opening note, the music is the star of Cirque Du Soleil’s LOVE. The Beatles provided the soundtrack in my childhood and words fail to describe the amazing soundscape lovingly created by Sir George Martin and his son Giles Martin in the Abby Road Studio. The music erupts through a breath taking custom sound system designed by Jonathan Deans that engulfs the audience in a way Paul, George, John and Ringo could never have imagined; notes leap into the air through 6,341 speakers, including three per individual seat with a stereo pair built into the headrest.
The Love Theater at the Mirage, like all Cirque shows in Vegas, features an incredible stage that is integral to the show. This one has nine lifts, eight automated tracks and trolleys that allows seamless transitions between sets along with chain motors built into the ceiling that allows incredible, gravity defying maneuvers and reverse bungy jumping, enabling performers to fly upward and spin through the air. The stage faces all directions, nullifying the usual orientation of “front” and “back.” 2,013 seats set around a central stage in eight sections; there isn’t a bad seat in the house.
The circus performance is more ephemeral and harder to describe. The choreography guiding the myriad movement and visual images is both entertaining and overwhelming, continually enchanting the audience as they stare at whatever piece of the tapestry caught your attention.
The storyline seems loosely intended to trace the rise of the Beatles from their days in Hamburg to their emergence into super stardom, then on to their breakup in the 70’s. Along the way, we see England emerging from World War II and allusions to the psychedelics and politics, the war and cultural revolution that were the cultural milieu of the Beatles era. These moments are communicated primarily through colorful costumes, iconic symbols and fictitious characters like Sargent Pepper, Lucy in the Sky, Eleanor Rigby, Lady Madonna and Mr. Kite.
The show itself represents a “reunion,” if bittersweet, as it seeks some form of closure for a story that so tragically lacks a happy ending. The support and unreserved enthusiasm for the project by the surviving band members, the families of the departed, along with the dedication and devotion of the Martins provides some closure and makes the goal of a happy ending almost obtainable. As Sir George Martin told the BBC,
“It was strange, writing this for an old friend who was no longer with us. Yesterday was first score I ever wrote for a Beatle song way back in 1965 and this, 41 years later, is the last. They bookend an extraordinary time…I never thought I would get this deeply involved with the Beatles again. It’s been a real journey but we were doing something worthwhile.” He, continued, “We were trying to create a feeling of what the Beatles were all about, and what they were all about was love.”
Thanks to the hard work of Martin, McCartney and the Cirque creative wizardry, the audience gets to be deeply involved with the Fab Four again, if only for a few fleeting hours. Don’t miss your chance to feel the LOVE again.
by Jonah Stein on November 30, 2009
I’ve gotten tired of lugging my Nikon D300s
everywhere, so I have decided to pickup one of these new super zoom miniature digital cameras. After some research, I have chosen the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3 
10MP Digital Camera with 12x Wide Angle MEGA Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3 inch LCD (Blue).
It also does 720P HDTV. I will let you know what I think after I play with it take some shots for my site.
by Jonah Stein on November 19, 2009
While sitting around at Pubcon chewing the fat ( a marvelous Rib Eye) with a couple of very, very smart people who shall remain nameless, the subject of the emerging war between Apple and Google came up. Specifically, we were discussing the one box music search and the notable absense of iTunes from the choices for to buy digital content from Google’s new music player in the SERP.
After we agreed that cloud based DRM has certain advantages for users and lamented that Apple was unlikely to counter by licensing iTunes for Palm, Droid, RIM or Symbian (too bad because it would be a pretty shrewd move to counter Google and put a lot of pressure on everyone to make DRM purchases portable across platform), we got to discussing monetization of the OneBox and what a slippery slope that represesented.
Ultimately the conversation turned to MySpace and how it was trying to find its way back to its “roots” as a community for music and bands. Suddenly, it struck me that Apple needs to buy MySpace. Before you say I am crazy, hear me out:
- NewsCorp is getting hammered lately and bleeding cash, including over $1 million/month in vacant office space for MySpace alone. Selling MySpace certainly wouldn’t get anything like the $15 billion dollar valuation that was once being bandied about, but even $2.5 billion would be a nice cash infusion along with a huge profit versus the $580 million acquisition price.
- Apple has something like $35 billion in the bank and billions more coming in every quarter. There are not a lot of attractive acquisitions for Apple that really provide “synergy”, they aren’t likely to start paying a dividend and they have no reason to consider a huge stock buy back. Apple has never made major acquisition and frankly it isn’t clear what technology company they would want to buy except perhaps Garmin or some other source of turn-by-turn data to counter Google. All that cash is just balance sheet bling.
- MySpace has lost its mojo and is in desperate need of being cool, hip and relevant again. Apple would immediately polish that turd and erase the stench from the idea that Fox New and MySpace are owned by the same company, a definite issue for many hipsters and “Hollywood Elites”
- Integrating with iTunes would instantly make all that music content, fan data and miscellaneous comments relevant, compelling and even VALUABLE and possibly even generate revenue by connecting directly to iTunes titles.
- The worst kept secret in the valley is that Apple is trying to become a player in streaming media to compete with the cable companies and possibly YouTube in the battle for the living room. MySpace is well connected in Hollywood and could provide many of the same synergies for iTunes play to move from the laptop to the living room.
- Apple is known for amazing industrial design, clean, intuitive user interface and MySpace… uhm… MySpace could use some of that.
- MySpace is heavily invested in geo, so it has a nice foundation for a local play and provides some synergies for potential iPhone GPS based services that are currently powered by Google.
- Finally, MySpace is STILL a fairly major online destination. Convert iTunes visitors into web traffic and the combined entity is suddenly one of the top 5 web destinations with an enormous user base which is large enough to slug it out with the other platform players. Short of making a play for Yahoo, MySpace is the only property that could allow Apple to jump off the sidelines and compete on the social front.
If anyone at Apple is listening, now is the time to act, before MySpace either finds its way or becomes irrelevant. You may not be able to get into the Google OneBox, but if you play your cards right you could dominate the organic results for music, television and movies and bring users right to your door. And if you do decide to go for it, just send me 1% for putting the deal together.
Update: 02/15/2010
MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta was unceremoniously fired last week after MySpace fell $32 million short of quarterly targets amid rumors on tension among the 3 top executives alone with some micromanagement from above, aka John Miller, head of News Corps Digital division. Add another round of layoffs since November and MySpace is probably available for a song… or 1.55 billion songs @1.29/each in a deal which does not officially disclose the purchase price.
by Jonah Stein on November 4, 2009
Ever over-think a problem or make things too complicated? Work to hard to explain a concept and feel like you are losing half the audience?
For the last two years I have been struggling to communicate how it is crucial that site owners do the right thing by their users, even if that means forgoing short-term profits for long-term rewards. In this crusade, I coined the term Virtual Blight and have taken every opportunity to try to get people to listen to me. I have bashed Twitter for turning a blind eye to spam, I have presented at the Web 2.0 Expo and the Web 2.0 Summit and I have probably alienated more than a few colleagues along the way.
Last week, In his TechCrunch bombshell How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession Facebook advertising guru Dennis Yu summed up the whole issue in a 10 words: Facebook will either clean things up or become a MySpace.
So, there you have it; Virtual Blight and two years of writing and speaking summed up in a sentence.
Thanks Dennis.
by Jonah Stein on October 20, 2009
Lots of Search Engine Marketers talk about the tools they use. Tools for SEO such as keyword research, link analysis and site audits. Tools for PPC like bid management and reporting. Tools for conversion tracking, analytics, and optimization. SEM is rapidly evolving and new tools are introduced every week.. ItsTheROI uses many of those tools and we never stop looking for new ones and hearing what people have to say about what they like.
There is a whole different category to tools that we use every day that have nothing to do with Search Engines. These are online tools that make it possible for us to run a small business. Some business tools are so mundane that they are not worth a detailed discussion — No one really wants me to tell them about my DSL connection, my iPhone or what hardware is on my desk. Some are services such as hosting that go beyond the scope of this article
EchoSign: Do you hate printing agreements so you can sign them and then scan them again? Ever wonder how you are going to get those hours of your life back? Does your paper filing system lack organization? Do you ever forget to follow up on an agreement you sent out? Have you lost track of all of those NDAs? If you answered yes to any of these questions or most of them, then you will fall in love with the powerful yet simple contact management and electronic signature service offered by EchoSign.
It is really very simple.
- Upload a Word Document, PDF or just about any other text doc.
- Open the document in their preview screen and place the fields you require such as name, date, title and signature.
- Email the document to the other party. You can e-sign it first or you can wait for them to send it back with the electronic signature.
- Get a completed agreement.
- You now have a legal agreement that has a digital signature, document management with an archive, the works.
Efax: If you are like me, you haven’t owned a physical fax machine for years. None the less, business still occasionally demands that 20th century form factor. When that happens, nothing is easier than an fax to email service and Efax delivers for a price that is hard to beat… Nada. Ok, they do push some advertising my way and a bunch of emails that Gmail intercepts, but overall it is hard to beat.
Freshbooks: If you are not an accountant, accounting software tends to have a relatively steep adoption curve. Freshooks small business accounting software offers a hosted solution that is easy to use. While it is more expensive than Quickbooks or other desktop accounting solutions, Freshbooks makes it easy to setup repeat billing and sends the invoices automatically each month. That feature alone is worth the $14/month it costs.
PayCycle: Payroll is another one of those tasks that takes a lot of time and creates lots of stress. Have you filed your payroll taxes this month? Did you fill the form out correctly? How about calculating the withholding? Why does the Franchise Tax Board keep sending me letters that could be reminders about something I have already done or a threat to sue me or possible an invitation to an all day seminar about properly completing a payroll stub? Whatever the reason, I don’t have time to do that s**t and online payroll software means I don’t have to think about it.
Special bonus feature, I have all of my contractors setup on direct deposit, so I can pay them immediately without addressing an envelop, finding a stamp or giving it another thought. Paycycle.com does for employees and contractors what online banking did for paying your bills.
Updated: 4/28/2010
Task Squid is a online task management software developed by one of my clients for their own use and now coming out of beta as an actual product. Task Squid is really cool because it leverages the social networking tools I already use every day like twitter, SMS, IM, Google Calendar and Facebook to let me stay on top of tasks, invite others to participate and update the status of each task. The most interesting thing about Task Squid is that it is designed to remove the friction of adding a new user to an individual task without adding them to a team or setting permissions for other projects.
